Carnival Cruise Line’s Adolfo Perez

Adolfo Perez last week was named vice president of trade sales and marketing, succeeding Joni Rein. Perez is a Carnival Cruise Line stalwart, having joined in 1982 as an embarkation agent. Previous roles at the line included vice president of reservations and general manager of Carnival UK. Perez spoke with cruise editor Tom Stieghorst about his new role.

Q: Your title is a bit different from Joni Rein’s, vice president of worldwide sales. How are your responsibilities going to be different?

A: As far as the title, I think we really wanted to define the fact that it is for trade sales. My job actually will be Joni’s job, plus part of the job I have right now which is running the U.K. office in London. It’s just a matter of semantics.

Q: Your most recent job was vice president of new markets and new product marketing. What did that entail?

A: When I came back from London in 2013, one of the first projects I worked on was a Hispanic marketing campaign in Southern California, as well as the launch for Carnival Live. I also worked on Carnival Journeys, the marketing of that, and the Carnival Vista launch from New York.

Q: Did you seek this job or were you asked to apply for it?

A: No, no. I definitely raised my hand for the job. I had done this job in the U.K. and it was a part of the job I really enjoyed.

Q: What do you think travel agents want from Carnival in 2015?

A: I think travel agents want an open line of communication with Carnival. I think we had a really great start with that with Carnival Conversations. I think they want to be heard. They want us to understand what challenges they have. And they’re going to look to us not only to listen but to make changes where we can so that we’re easier to do business with.

Q: What would you like to see more of from agents?

A: I’ll be honest with you, I think I have a lot of learning to do, because I think things have changed a lot since I kind of stepped out of the U.S. as far as the trade is concerned. There’s a lot of home workers now, and I really think I need to get in there and understand what the landscape is like today.

Q: What is your philosophy about soliciting business directly from travel agents’ customers?

A: I used to run the call centers, both for travel agent sales and consumer sales. It was always my policy — I know people challenge it sometimes, mistakes happen sometimes — it was always our policy that if someone knowingly tried to take the business away from a travel agent that was the end of their career at Carnival. I mean, there were no ifs, ands or buts about it. I’m not going to lie to you and say it never happened, because it did happen, and the times it happened where we knew it really happened we would take care of the situation. Sometimes you would get blamed for stuff that was very gray; you know, the customer didn’t tell us the truth, and those kind of things have happened in the past.

But my philosophy, and the company’s philosophy, has always been that we do not actively take travel agents’ business.

So if the travel agent gives us the customer’s phone number or email address, that is not in any way, shape or form used as a way to directly market to those people and take the business away from the agent.